and you thought Resident Evil was cartoonish

Puppets, Sock Puppets, Shadow Puppets, Finger Puppets, Oil Paint, Water Color, Acrylic Paint, Ink, Markers, Conte, Charcoal, Pastels, Pencils, Cels, Sand, Cut Outs, Comic Panels, Machinima, In-Game, Flash, Power Point, After Effects, 3D Models, Step Motion, Stop Motion, Photography, Silhouettes, Dolls, Clay, Metal, Wood…

...will be among the methods on display in Night of the Living Dead: Re-Animated, a new take on your favorite and mine. Engineered by animator Mike Schneider, taking full advantage of the perhaps-too-easy conceptual link between zombification and 're-animation,' it's a "mass collaborative animation," an open-call project for animators and visual artists of any sort to recreate or replace a selected chunk of visuals, eventually painting over the whole film.

I naturally wondered what happens when Schneider receives a hundred and eighty clips covering the same four key sequences, but he has a plan in place: a public vote on established public zombie discussion forums (he cites Zombie Nation [please, not to be confused with German electro act Zombie Nation] and All Things Zombie), with non-selected clips winding up in DVD bonus features.

There's an intriguing distribution model as well. In-progress versions will be shown at interested spots around the country, giving folks the opportunity to learn about it while there's still time to submit work. The finished flick, after limited festival screening, will be distributed free of charge on the internet through torrenting (a deal with Demonoid has been set up), with potential revenue from DVD sales and a hefty selection of complete-project and individual-artist merch already up at the film's website.

Plenty of time to get your work in before the December 15 deadline. The only rules: "Must be your own work, must match the original audio, must be in black and white." Sign up or check out samples over at the site. Some look intriguing, some look terrible. More than a couple look like A-Ha's "Take On Me" video, but then, there are some intriguing zombie connections. Tell me you don't see it:

So needless to say
I'm odds and ends
But that's me stumbling away

You're shying away
I'll be coming for you anyway

Take on me
Take me on
I'll be gone
In a day or two

further punishment

So I was sitting in the bargain theater, waiting for the $2 matinee of The Incredible Hulk to begin, and I got to thinking about my post calling T.I. Hulk possibly the first film do-over. While the bargain theater doesn't always show the officially attached trailers, I think the Punisher: War Zone teaser trailer debuted in front of Hulk a couple months back, and so though I didn't see it, I got to thinking about whether War Zone isn't a mulligan as well. It seems to be looked at as a sequel, but when the title character doesn't reprise his role in the second film, four years after the first, the semantics might come into play.

Punisher: War Zone shot under working titles of Punisher 2 (of course, Hulk shot under Hulk 2 as well) and the marquee-confounding Punisher: Welcome Back, Frank, the given title of the first in a relatively well-regarded Garth Ennis run on the Punisher monthly.



The troubled Punisher: War Zone production in brief:
John Dahl offered directing job, not interested. Cites script: "not that good."
Thomas Jane "regretfully and painfully" drops out, declines to state reason, though second-hand information claims it's due to his backing of director Walter Hill, whom Lionsgate decided wasn't the guy for the job.
Jane replaced with Ray Stevenson of Rome.
Kurt Sutter, writer of then-current draft, removes himself from credit arbitration (due to numerous other writers, he wouldn't likely have gotten credit in any case).
Lexi Alexander [pictured], director of well-regarded Green Street Hooligans, rumored off project after no-show at Comic-Con panel. Blog posts containing Punisher-related materials replaced with "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" monkeys. Monkey post shortly removed.
Alexander's composer Christopher Franke (who scored her Green Street Hooligans and Johnny Flynton) removed, replaced with Michael Wandmacher.
Extremely violent aggro jock-metal trailer makes rounds after Comic-Con.
Flick set for December 5 release.

Punisher '04 is itself a retry, of course, after Dolph Lundgren starred in an adaptation back in the 90s. And we know how well those both turned out!

..

Just got the word that the management company is gonna do some remodeling work on my apartment, so I'll be absent for a little while to clean house in preparation.

Neither Gilles Mimouni's L'Appartement nor Luna Kim's The Apartment is a remake of Billy Wilder's famed The Apartment. For that matter, neither is Tobe Hooper's 1999 made-for-TV The Apartment Complex, starring Obba Babatundé, Patrick Warburton, R. Lee Ermey, Charles Martin Smith, Tyra Banks, and with Jon Polito as "Dr. Caligari," but guess what? I'm gonna watch it anyway.

en serie

KOTOR II

"...we have another Republican nominee who’s telling us the exact same thing — that this time things will be different,” Biden said. “This time he’ll put country before party. Folks, we’ve seen this movie before. And we know the sequel is always worse than the original.”



Thanks to hollie horror for this!

Kinds of Light

Selected sequels from filmography of James Incandenza.

Cage II. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions. Cosgrove Watt, Disney Leith; 35 mm.; 120 minutes; black and white; sound. Sadistic penal authorities place a blind convict (Watt) and a deaf-mute convict (Leith) together in 'solitary confinement,' and the two men attempt to devise ways of communicating with each other. LIMITED CELLULOID RUN; RERELEASED ON MAGNETIC VIDEO.

Cage III — Free Show. B.S. Latrodectus Mactans Productions/Infernatron Animation Concepts, Canada. Cosgrove Watt, P.A. Heaven, Everard Maynell, Pam Heath; partial animation; 35 mm.; 65 minutes; black and white; sound. The figure of Death (Heath) presides over the front entrance of a carnival sideshow whose spectators watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so grotesquely compelling that the spectators' eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs, while on the other side of the sideshow tent the figure of Life (Heaven) uses a megaphone to invite fairgoers to an exhibition in which, if the fairgoers consent to undergo unspeakable degradations, they can witness ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs. INTERLACE TELENT FEATURE CARTRIDGE #357-65-65.

Incandenza, certainly, not known for his originality. See Romney and Sperber, 'Has James O. Incandenza Ever Even Once Produced One Genuinely Original or Unappropriated or Nonderivative Thing?' Post-Millennium Film Cartridge Journal, nos. 7-9 (Fall/Winter, Y.P.W.), pp. 4-26.

Funhouse

Uwe Boll is nothing if not defensive of his work. Loudly so, in most cases; physically, in others, as when he boxed several smaller, untrained film-critic opponents.

"I think I made a perfect House of the Dead movie," said Boll, referring to his comically idiotic action-horror flick, based on a fun, not-too-serious series of zombie-shootup video games. Later, re-evaluating his catalog: "House, 3 out 10 (for good action, CGI, sound)." At time of writing, House of the Dead is #39 on the IMDb's Bottom 100 list, with a 1.9 rating.

Boll is one of the internet's favorite scapegoats, a position he generally seems to enjoy. In any case, if the prevailing wind criticizes Boll's work, let no one say Boll does not also blow: he joins the fun today by re-releasing 2003's House of the Dead in a new edition, labeled Director's Cut. Also labeled "Funny Version." The problem here is that the original obviously was the funny version; short of subcontracting Rifftrax, there's probably not much you can do to punch up the comedy content.


























The specific content of the new disc is a bit sparse – Lionsgate's own site has nothing more than a small picture of the new edition buried in the catalog, but no description sets it aside from the original. Third parties cite "new dialogue, alternative takes, pop-up commentary and animation from the original video game." They may be understandably confused – animation from the video game abounds in the standard cut of the film. I can state this with certainty, because when I saw the original cut of the film, my friends and I lost count of the number of clips of the original video game. We're not unskilled counters. The number was in the thirties.